Review of How Language Began, by Daniel Everett

[Review for The Linguist, issue 57/1 January 2018] How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention Daniel L. Everett Profile Books 2017, 352 pp ISBN: 978-1781253922 Hardback: £25.00 E-book: £19.99 In his new book, the American linguist and anthropologist Daniel Everett seeks to answer a question that for centuries has fascinated linguists and non-linguists alike: how did human language first develop? Mainstream scholarly opinion places the origin of language somewhere between 200,000 and 50,000 BCE, coinciding with the rise of homo sapiens and a discernible leap forward in human cultural output. Everett disagrees: he reckons that humans were using a means of communication recognisable as language in the times of homo sapiens’ predecessor, homo erectus, thus pushing back the potential starting date for the initial emergence of language to almost 2 million years ago. In Everett’s opinion, conventional thinking in this area is erroneous for two main reasons. First, he rejects the idea (championed by Noam Chomsky) that the human language capacity appeared virtually overnight some 50 millennia ago due to a genetic mutation affecting the human brain. Everett is well-known for his opposition to the “Universal Grammar” and “Language Instinct” schools; in his view, our linguistic ability is not derived from a genetic anomaly and does not rely on any innate language-learning capacity. Rather, Everett considers that language followed a process of gradual evolution in line with, and interacting with, other human cognitive capacities. Second, he considers that even though early man’s linguistic communication may have been grammatically very simple, it was still “true language”. He rejects the idea that communications between pre-sapiens hominins should be classed as crude “protolanguage”. Everett feels that modern theoretical linguists overemphasise the importance of grammatical complexity, to the detriment of semiotic and epistemic factors. In his opinion, a given community’s language can be relatively simple in grammatical terms yet still contain the elements required to fulfil its communicative and cultural needs. He supports this assertion drawing on his own extensive fieldwork among Amazonian peoples whose languages, while grammatically unsophisticated because they conform to their speakers’ “immediacy of experience” world-view, are phonologically highly complex. Everett also explains the existing palaeontological and evolutionary evidence for early hominins’ culture-related behaviour and their ability to implement complex collective ventures, which in his view must have required specific linguistic interaction. As he concludes: “Only language is able to explain the homo erectus cognitive revolution.” How Language Began provides a lively account of the various issues involved in language evolution, as well as Everett’s own controversial and potentially paradigm-shifting theory on this engrossing subject. Ross Smith MCIL